Ma Po Tofu

a sissified and emasculated ma po tofu.

I recently read Jenny 8. Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which subconsciously inspired me to do Chinese for lunch today.

Chinese foods follows 8 general regions of cooking, the most famous being Cantonese. Many well known American created Chinese dishes are based on Cantonese dishes (the earliest importers of Chinese cooking were Canton immigrants botching their wives’ cooking). But if you are a fan of spicy food, Sichuan cuisine utilizes a particulary fiery brand of spice called Sichuan peppercorn, which produces a distinctive “ma la” – a numbing sensation, one where your throat and tongue dully throb.

Eating a Sichuanese meal is an interesting experience, to say the least. When I was eating lunch in Chengdu, a city in Sichuan, I grabbed a skewer and realized it was three miniature birds. All with their heads still attached, they were essentially just bones and golden, crackly fried skin. And spices. Each bite was a fiery, numbing mouthful of crunch. I lost sensation of my tongue.

I figured that I would have Chinese food for lunch after I finished a taxing shopping trip. Perhaps I should have known better since Taste of China wasn’t advertised as a Sichuan restaurant, but I thought ma po tofu, literally, pockmarked lady tofu, would be a nice lunch. Which was why I was surprised when the waitress place the picture above in front of me. Not a crumb of pork meat in sight. I had to dig inside my tough, rubbery wonton (more on that later) for a morsel of carnivorous goodness.

Real ma po tofu has some kind of ground meat – usually pork, which is popular in Chinese cooking, or beef – and the soft tofu swims in a pool of fiery, chile-laced oil. But my version had peas, carrots, a few sliced mushrooms, and the spice barely amounted to more than a few tingles that were chased away with some tap water. I hadn’t really been expecting authentic “ma la,” but coupled with the lack of meat, I felt cheated.

Confused, I thought about why they would prepare this way without even warning that it was a vegetarian version on the menu. As I looked at the non-Chinese diners, I realized that dishes with the word “tofu” in them were not likely to be ordered by the primarily white and Hispanic Tarrytown public. Only vegetarians would order some mysterious tofu dish in a Chinese restaurant when beef with broccoli and sweet and sour chicken were offered.

One more thing: why do all Chinese restaurants serve that godawful wonton soup? The broth is a tasty enough golden liquid of MSG goodness. But the wonton itself is constructed of some kind of industrial rubber cooked on low long enough to degrade to a thick, pliant skin. The inside is a half-thimble of jellied pork.

The only reasoning I could come up with here was that they must make this wonton soup far in advance, so the wrappers had to super thick and durable to withstand reheating and bobbing about in salty broth for long periods of time. If you’ve ever had a homemade wonton, you know cooked wonton wrappers are white and nearly translucent, delicate and dimpling to belie their fillings.

I guess these are just the casualties of a restaurant adapting to fit their American consumer demographic. And that adaptation has produced such sweet, fried wonders like my childhood favorite, sweet and sour pork. Many happy hours were spent plucking the soft, tangy pineapple chunks from its syrupy bed. If only this restaurant had spared the tofu.